This article needs to connect a few dots.. the author starts taking about radiation damage and then about birth abnormalities in a particular province in the Ukraine which, I assume, is the province containing Chernobyl.. or is it? Then the article starts talking about alcohol causing birth defects.. at that point I signed out..

They weren't able to establish any link between the initial radition from Chernobyl and birth defects, for babies already conceived when the reactor melted down, in part because the Russians moved everyone and never kept records. Establishing one now on residual radiation more than 20 years after the event and still substantial distances from the site, would seem to be hopeful indeed. I haven't looked at the survey on which the article seems to be relying, but considering some of the stuff I've seen dressed up as research maybe I'll just pass on..

Posted by Curmudgeon, Wednesday, 24 October 2012 12:36:42 PM

Apart from Curmudgeons incredible dismissiveness of important research, he does actually raise a valid point. The article doesn't read well. In fact it appears to be written by someone who assumes you know the topic beforehand. The province that Chernobyl was in for example, which was the focus of the study by Dr. Wladimir Wertelecki, was not named. One actually has to do a google search to connect the dots that are laid before us in this article. Some of the blame must lay with the article editor of course, as it appears that there are subheadings that are not indicated as such.

Once the reader familiarlises themselves with Dr. Wladimir Wertelecki's work, the mention of alcohol related defects and malnutrition becomes far more clear, as these are also a problem in the Ukraine and were not explicitly controlled for in his study, as no information on the mothers diet for was collected. However, this needs to be mentioned first, not explained away by statisically lower alcohol use for the region at athe end of the paragraph. Otherwise the paragraph appears to be a non sequitur, and many OLO readers collapse at the first hurdle when this happens.

I would consider this a reasonable first draft but it needs far more transitional sentences to make the logic clear.

Posted by Bugsy, Wednesday, 24 October 2012 1:32:28 PM

There is no doubt that if there is any evidence to link birth defects with ionising radiation then it should be studied in detail.

I assume that the author of this article has done extensive research into the existence of any results from such studies. The only references she can offer is an article in The Guardian from 4 years ago and the International Birth Defects Prevention Program which appears to be run by an organisation called OMNI-Net run by a couple of medical geneticists possibly resident in east Europe.

This rather limited evidence doesn’t either confirm or deny the suggestion in the title that there is no safe level of radiation. There are several published papers on radiation hormesis that show this not to be the case but the author chose not to reference any of them.

In fact one of her references on the causes of foetus-teratogenesis in humans specifically states “There is no proof that human congenital malformations have been caused by diagnostic levels of radiation.”

This is a lively debate that needs to be had. This article seems to present only one side supporting LNT and doesn’t even discuss the possibility of radiation hormesis.

Posted by Martin N, Wednesday, 24 October 2012 1:50:31 PM

The author's thesis also needs to account for (the lack of) any apparent ill effects in areas where people have lived for generations in areas of naturally high radiation such as Ramsar.

Posted by Mark Duffett, Wednesday, 24 October 2012 8:39:23 PM

Answers to comments:CURMUDGEON –sounds as if he/she hasn’t really read the article.

BUGSY The article doesn’t “read well”. Sorry about the poor writing. (I'm from Tasmania) Wetelecki’s team did study “alcohol foetal syndrome" in that particular province.and elIminated it as the causeAs to the question of diet in that area, in fact – they went to considerable lengths to study both the diet and the soil in the area – and its radiation uptake into plants. Mushrooms, for example, very popular part of the diet there, and containing extraordinarily high levels of radiation.

MARK DUFFETT criticises “the suggestion in the title that there is no safe level of radiation.”. This is not a “suggestion”. This is accepted medical fact, as re stated recently by the Director General of the World Health Organisation.Of course I didn't reference the quack “science” of “radiation hormesis”. That idea is being promoted by dodgy DOE-funded research around the world, and by nuclear industry-paid promoters such as Doug Boreham, brought to Australia by Toro Energy and General Atomics.AS to the lack of ill effects in other areas of high natural radiation - easily explained as no studies of the thoroughness of Wertelecki’s have ever been done.

Posted by Noel.Wauchope, Thursday, 25 October 2012 12:10:44 PM

Noel, Wertelecki may have controlled for the diet by looking at it from a population perspective, but in the literature I've seen, including interviews with Wertelecki, they did not gete much data on the actual diets of the mothers that had malformed children. The spinal tube defects can be associated with folate deficiency, however it is difficult to control for with proper information at the individual level. I was not talking about the radiation in the diet at all.

The correlations are good, and can easily be explained by increases in residual radioactive elements in the area, and not easily explained by anything else, but with these sorts of population level studies it is always difficult to show causality.

Anyway, you are right- Curmudgeon would not have read the article. He doesn't like leaps of logic that aren't immediately clear, so burying your justification for talking about foetal alcohol syndrome at the end of the paragraph would have tripped him up. He also doesn't mind admitting this, but he's always ready for a comment.